November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  All this “closing in” was incredibly stupid. If you don’t intend to attack there’s no point in drawing nearer. That only makes the counterattack easier, which is what happened. At such close quarters German losses were also high, though they don’t pack as many men into a trench as we do, and with them every man counts for more. They suffered losses, and lost patience. So they decided to dislodge us and win themselves a quieter line.

  The most humiliating and horrible thing about this battle was that we were forewarned! A German soldier came over to our side in the night—interestingly enough, not a Pole, nor an Alsatian, but a pure German. Cowardice? Battle fatigue? Anyway, he warned us that there would be an attack the next morning. It didn’t, in fact, begin till midday, but this still didn’t help us. We had from midnight till noon the next day to reorganize and get ready, but couldn’t manage it. We lost as many men and retreated as far as if we had not received advance warning.

  Anyway, there’s no use trying to put things right if your faults are the air you breathe, if your faults are you. Germans rely on heavy artillery, Russians on God. When we draw the boundary lines between divisions strictly with reference to natural landmarks, just to make writing orders easier, and have no reserves ready to reinforce the junctions, what is to stop a whole battalion from strolling through a gap to take us from the rear? What if our sappers establish strongpoints not in concealed places but on hilltops, where they are more easily defended but can be safely bypassed on the lower slopes—and that’s the end of them? The war’s in its third year and we still can’t put steel helmets on our soldiers’ heads—think how many unnecessary casualties that has cost us. They send us the bare minimum of Zelinsky gas masks, strictly according to our nominal strength, so that if a man loses one, or is transferred or left for dead, there’s no mask for his replacement. We pack soldiers into our trenches two rifles to a sazhen, so close that firing is awkward. You’d think they were tightly packed on purpose, so that German shells won’t land in vain. But perhaps analysis of the battle of Skrobotovo isn’t worthwhile outside the 35th Corps. In any case, it is not an event of any significance for the Western Front, still less for the war in Europe as a whole. But for anyone who crawled through blood and over dead flesh there, and had no hope of crawling to safety, that battle divides his life in two: there’s before Skrobotovo and there’s after Skrobotovo.

  The Germans brought up, or realigned, guns from several other sectors, and were apparently planning a gas attack on our flank, from Lake Koldyczew. But they had to call it off because the wind obstinately favored the Russians.

  It had all made painful listening for Sanya, rocked him on his heels. But when he heard about the gas he clutched his head in both hands. Say what you like, there is something demoniac, diabolical about asphyxiating gases. Earth is no place for this form of warfare. Those who kill with poison gas are no longer human. They don’t even look human, especially at night, lit by shell bursts—those white rubber skulls, with square goggles and green proboscises.

  Yes, but did Germans carrying flame throwers look human: one man in front with a fire-spraying tube, one behind bent double under the gasoline tank?

  As it turned out, the Germans had made allowances for an unfavorable wind. They began their attack in an unorthodox way, bombarding our rear with gas shells, where we least expected them, so that the horses in particular suffered heavy casualties. (It was lucky that Chernega was not in the dugout!) And the wind had then carried the gas toward our positions. Our battery was one of those bombarded with chemical shells for two hours on end, the gas hung in the air, we were all suffocating in our gas masks. Nobody could hear the words of command, so Staff Captain Klementyev tore off his mask, barked out an order, and was gassed. Then they started peppering our forward positions with shrapnel, fragmentation bombs, fougasses. They raked Kupryukhin’s battalion with fire from above, then jumped down into their trench. They attacked seven times in a matter of hours, with intervals for bombardment. Two battalions had flame throwers. They took the whole of Lapin Hill, the “copse with the handle,” and the “Austro-Hungarian trench,” as we called them. The Soligalich Regiment was on the receiving end of all this. Then the Oka Regiment was sent in to counterattack.

  Our artillery brigade hadn’t done its sums correctly. They blazed away heavily at first, then suddenly realized that there weren’t enough shells, so many horses had been gassed that deliveries had fallen off. The need to economize left the Oka Regiment without adequate artillery support. As a result, although individual companies had advanced in bounds, by the end of the day the regiment as a whole had achieved nothing. Anyway, it was not in our power to lead an assault. Everything depends on whether the men will follow or not. You never know until the last moment. They’ll charge as one man when it’s a sure thing. But another time a company commander may have no more than a dozen soldiers behind him. And what kind of attack can you expect from a unit exhausted by confinement to the trenches and defeat? So that’s how the day went.

  In the night, our neighbors, the 55th Division, took the manor house at Skrobotovo. Next morning, Colonel Rusakovsky led the Oka Regiment into battle himself, got a bullet in the belly and was mortally wounded—but they retook the Austro-Hungarian trench.

  Retook it and packed it full of men. And there they—we!—were pounded all day long with shellfire. And we had nowhere to set up an observation post except right there, in the Austro-Hungarian trench. Lieutenant Gulai was sent to take a look. There really was nowhere else to put it, but with a temporary cable, broken every hour, and broken again before they finished mending it—there was no permanent, buried cable—the observer was of no earthly use. Communication was by exchange of notes, with a runner struggling to reach the battery via a communication trench which was caving in and filling up. That’s how our gunners had to operate while the men stuck in the trench were being pulverized. And then the Germans charged.

  One corner of Kotya’s pursed lips twisted in a grimace. He had managed to grab a dead man’s rifle. A hefty German had jumped down beside him. Kotya’s bayonet got there first. What’s it like, bayoneting somebody? Not at all difficult. Like sticking a knife into butter. But pulling it out, that’s something! Thought I’d never manage it. The hilt of the bayonet won’t let it come out—you see, in your ignorance you’ve driven it in too deep—and there you are with the man you’ve stabbed to death, he hasn’t closed his eyes yet, and you’re inseparable, you can’t get away from him. And there’s no room to turn around in the trench. But you must get your bayonet back quickly, before another of them lands on top of you.

  The savage look on his friend’s face frightened Sanya. (I could never kill anyone like that!) They were used to bloodshed by now, but this … Had you ever … was it the first time? (And there I was trying to distract him with trivialities!)

  “Yes, my friend.” Kotya slowly nodded his newly close-cropped dome. “Anybody who comes out alive from a hand-to-hand battle …”

  They had crawled out of the trench on all fours, over the wounded and the dead. It was this last picture that loomed large in Kotya’s memory: crawling along the trench over corpses and wounded men. Some of them, it seemed, were not wounded, but just lying down: let them all come, just as long as we don’t have to mount another attack. Then the machine gun wouldn’t go around a bend, because the bottom of the trench was too narrow, and they had to dismantle it while those crawling behind waited. Then men came crawling from both ends into the same communication trench and tried to shove each other out of the way. Those who stayed behind in the trench alive were no better off: they were sprayed by flame throwers and burned to death in black smoke, while suffocating fumes drifted over the whole area.

  “It must have been terrifying!”

  “D’you know, you get so desperate you don’t care whether they kill you or not. As if you’ve accepted death already and there’s nothing more to be afraid of. And nothing more you want.”

  That was the end of the battle. Tow
ard evening they abandoned the Austro-Hungarian trench and were fortifying a new line—from the “left gas trench” up to the manor house. The battle may have had some other significance for observers on the sidelines, but to Lieutenant Gulai it meant no more than this: that they had sat there half a day, helpless victims, without doing anything, and that only a handful of them had miraculously survived. Their losses over two days amounted to 1,253 men. That was just for the 81st Division. General Parchevsky should have been set down there himself, together with those who had contrived that battle at Skrobotovo.

  So that (for them) the European “World War” was divided into two parts: before Skrobotovo and after Skrobotovo. “After” was only just beginning. Kotya had come to see Sanya before he had quite recovered.

  The first consolation for those at war, though only for officers, was obtainable from the shop at the Brigade Club, or supplied in a medicine bottle by the doctor. (Common soldiers never got a sip from one end of the war to the other.) Feel like a drink? Come on, then, while it lasts. The potatoes have stopped sizzling, they’re getting cold. Half a tumbler full of the liquid that looks so much like water simplifies the world’s problems. And consoles you.

  Sanya had a story of his own to tell. Things have been happening here too. On 31 October the Moscow Grenadiers had carried out a reconnaissance raid. The reason for the raid was that a whole German regiment had withdrawn to Romania, and our feelings were hurt: weren’t they taking us seriously? So we shelled their wire barricades by daylight, breached them in a few places, and, still by daylight, went in to the attack. Another fiasco. To begin with, they hadn’t cleared the passages completely, and the infantry had to finish cutting the wire. Second, the German machine gunners were never silent. They were obviously sitting comfortably in blockhouses. We broke through to the German trenches in a few places, but some companies of the Moscow Regiment lay flat on their faces in the mud, right by the wire barricades. They were ordered to retreat singly, but couldn’t get to their feet, because the firing was fiercer than ever. This went on till it was dark. So much for the raid: they took one wounded German, and one machine gun. Of the grenadiers 18 were killed, 203 wounded, and 147 left lying there for another twenty-four hours, till it grew dark and they were helped back.

  Of those two engagements it was impossible to say which was the more absurd. But the friends were not in competition with their stories, because Sanya had not been in the Moscow Regiment’s sector and had not lain in the mud all day, whereas Kotya had returned from the other world, and they might easily have never seen each other again. And anyway, Sanya wasn’t bursting to pass on news about the grenadiers. He had hoped that Kotya would take his mind off all that.

  Kotya had much more to tell him. After his spell in the Austro-Hungarian trench he had somehow become acutely aware of things near and not so near, of the war, of the whole world, in a way quite new to him. Before, it had been just the opposite. He hadn’t liked talking about the way things were going generally, what he called “politics,” he would talk only about his regiment, his brigade, about what was nearest to him. His new, keen insight made him no happier, it made him miserable, but at least he felt that now he knew.

  Knew that the generals and GHQ did not share our griefs, didn’t really care what happens. Some of them must have heads on their shoulders—what were they thinking of, why couldn’t they see what was going on? Nowadays too many officers had an eye to the main chance, and heroism had come to mean wangling a George medal without undue risk. (A good thing I changed my tunic, Sanya thought.) As for the six-week ensigns, they weren’t officers at all. And the whole army wasn’t what it was when we first knew it last year.

  He had acquired a peculiar new gesture: an oblique chopping motion, always with the right hand, as though he was slashing at something with his sword. Cutting away deadwood.

  For all Kotya’s hacking Sanya was not so easily convinced. Tentatively, not wanting to cross him, to offend him, but astounded to find that Kotya seemed not to feel the most hurtful thing of all: “My dear Kotya … How can I put it? In a sense defeat is easier to bear than victory … I mean, it’s terrible to die, in the meat grinder, a helpless victim … when you want to live! Especially if like us you haven’t yet lived at all! But to be all in one piece yourself and kill others—surely that’s more terrible still. You wouldn’t want to go on living after that anyway … Would you?”

  Sanya looked hopefully at his friend. His thinking was painful and confused, no one in the army understood it, but surely the friend who had shared his youthful sessions in the library must understand.

  But Kotya’s expression hardened into a savage glare, he stared at Sanya like a madman, as if he was forcing his way with difficulty through—what? The shell-shocked daze in which the battle at Skrobotovo had left him? The blatant stupidity of what Sanya was saying? He dismissed it angrily, with an oblique sweep of his hand.

  “Spare me Dostoevsky!”

  He struck the same pose again—one leg over the other, laced fingers clasping one knee, staring past Sanya, past the table, at something on the floor, and said with a look of black despair, “We’re a pair of fools, you and I. What the devil impelled us to volunteer at the very beginning of the war? We could very well have waited till we graduated from Moscow University and gone on to officers’ school afterward. That’s what bothers me the most—that we put our own heads in the noose. We’d have been wrong to shirk it? Wrong to wait a while? That’s all nonsense. It was our own crazy idea.”

  He seemed to be recalling Sanya’s arguments at the time, remembering that it was mostly Sanya who had dragged the two of them into it.

  Well, perhaps it was true, perhaps it had been that way. Kotya hadn’t the heart to reproach his friend directly. But the effect was the same. And Sanya felt called on to find new arguments, a new justification.

  Only his head was buzzing after the drink—he wasn’t used to it—and he wasn’t sure whether it eased his misery or aggravated it. Every word that passed between them that day chipped away at, eroded their friendship, more and more irreparably dividing their foolish student past from the hopeless future.

  Sanya had not expected this. Indeed, he had never been conscious of such a divide. Quite the contrary. On long, sleepless nights he visualized his life as a single luminous path extending into the future.

  But he had no ready answer. In the ever-flowing stream of humanity some people, for whatever reason, were destined to achieve great things, in long and eventful lives. And others to die young, without making any contribution of their own, their good intentions and ambitions unrealized.

  “There’s nothing we can do about it, Kotya. We can’t regard our own lives as more important than the general scheme of things. I suppose that even the soul of one who has departed life early with nothing achieved is no less precious in the eyes of God, and that its place is not lost.”

  Kotya looked at him uncomprehendingly, as if he was a half-wit.

  “Oh, well … God, now … that’s something I can’t talk about seriously.”

  He closed his eyes tight, opened them again and burst out: “Where is it, then, this place for the departed soul when the bullet has finished off the body? Am I supposed to believe in those fairy stories about the Second Coming, believe in the resurrection of the body, with Scipio Africanus, Louis XVI, and I myself, Konstantin Gulai, one of these days individually resurrected? Nonsense.”

  They were scraping up the last of the potatoes, cold by now, with their forks.

  “We mustn’t oversimplify … But the soul cannot, of course, be killed by a bullet … It will return in one way or another to the region of … to the bosom of the World Spirit.”

  Konstantin snorted and made no attempt to answer.

  At that point Ustimovich came in, lowering his head under the narrow beams that held up the ceiling. An absurd, clumsy figure, looking older than he was, with a big nose and big ears, harassed beyond endurance, not so much by the war itself as by milita
ry discipline and separation from his family, Ensign Ustimovich spent every waking moment of his life in the army more dead than alive. He was introduced to Kotya and sat down to help finish the potatoes and swig what was left of the vodka.

  Sanya had meant all along to warn Kotya—but hadn’t gotten around to it—to make allowances for the “gas commandant,” not to laugh at him, or show the contempt which talented young people often feel for misfits and failures: the man had been torn from his family and his teaching job, he hadn’t been trained as an artillery officer, he couldn’t shoot, he knew nothing about field guns, and he had seen only a few months of active service.

  But it all went smoothly. Ustimovich began questioning Kotya in his unassuming, pleasantly hoarse voice, and Kotya, still reliving the grimness of what he had been through, told the whole story to Ustimovich, as he would tell it over and over again. He needed to do this, to unburden himself, to rid himself of it, and Ustimovich made a good listener, gasping and groaning in the right places, sympathizing—it was terrible to imagine his large defenseless body in that shallow, corpse-carpeted trench. They leaned toward each other at the corner of the table, and Sanya suddenly realized that they were somehow alike, although Ustimovich was getting on for fifty, and Kotya half his age, and although Ustimovich had a narrow head and luxuriant black hair, while Kotya’s head widened at the temples and cheekbones, and his hair was reddish. But there was the same harsh shadow of despair on their faces. Ustimovich had looked like that since his first day there.